The Rocky Mountain Fur Company, sometimes called Ashley's Hundred, was organized in St. Louis, Missouri in 1823 by General William H. Ashley and Major Andrew Henry (c. 1775-1832). They posted advertisements in St. Louis newspapers seeking "One Hundred enterprising young men . . . to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years." Among those hired were Jedediah Smith, the four Sublette brothers, including William and Milton, Jim Beckwourth, Thomas Fitzpatrick and David Edward Jackson, who in 1826, bought the Company and for the next seven years it continued to prosper. Other mountain men who worked for the Company were Jim Bridger, Joseph Meek, Robert Newell, George W. Ebbert, and Kit Carson.
Major Henry's plan was formed in response to a July 1822 law prohibiting the sale of alcohol to Indians. Prior to this point, the fur trade had relied on Indians to do the actual trapping and hunting that produced the furs; they were then brought to trading posts where, with increasing frequency, the Indians were given liquor both as an actual medium of exchange, and in order to render them pliant and easily cheated. The pattern was so firmly established that it was difficult to conduct business without a substantial supply of alcohol. Henry's plan made Indian trappers and trading posts unnecessary—he trained young American men to trap, and had them meet him at rendezvous, which were temporary, and could be located wherever it was convenient.
The Rocky Mountain Fur Company was a rival to Hudson's Bay Company and John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company. They frequently held their rendezvous near a Hudson's Bay Company post to draw off some of their Indian trade, and their trappers went into the Snake, Umpqua and Rogue River valleys, all of which were considered the domain of the Hudson's Bay Company.
The fur trade declined in the 1830s due to major declines in the beaver population and the fact that beaver hats were going out of style, replaced by hats made of silk. A Hudson's Bay Company policy of underselling the American fur companies in the Rocky Mountains during the late 1830s succeeded in destroying the American system and led to the failure of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company.
Famous quotes containing the words rocky mountain, rocky, mountain, fur and/or company:
“Who will join in the march to the Rocky Mountains with me, a sort of high-pressure-double-cylinder-go-it-ahead-forty-wildcats- tearin’ sort of a feller?... Git out of this warming-pan, ye holly-hocks, and go out to the West where you may be seen.”
—Administration in the State of Miss, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He was a fool—a brilliant man and I loved his beard, and there was the mountain ax in his brain, and all the blood poured out, and he could not see the Mexican sun. Your people raised the ax, and the last blood of revolutionary mankind, his poor blood, ran into the carpet.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“I have no doubt that they lived pretty much the same sort of life in the Homeric age, for men have always thought more of eating than of fighting; then, as now, their minds ran chiefly on the “hot bread and sweet cakes;” and the fur and lumber trade is an old story to Asia and Europe.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)